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Whither Judaism and the West

What follows is the Conclusion of the last book("The Culture of Critique:
An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvment in Twentieth-Century
Intellectual and Political Movements") of the three-volume "Judaism as a Group
Evolutionary Strategy" series, by Kevin MacDonald.

Conclusion: Whither Judaism and the West?

One conclusion of this volume is that Jews have played a decisive role in
developing highly influential intellectual and political movements that serve
their interests in contemporary Western societies. These movements are only
part of the story however. There has been an enormous growth in Jewish power
and influence in Western societies generally, particularly the United States.
Ginsberg (1993) notes that Jewish economic status and cultural influence have
increased dramatically in the United States since 1960. Shapiro (1992, 116)
shows that Jews are over-represented by at least a factor of nine on indexes
of wealth, but that this is a conservative estimate, because much Jewish
wealth is in real estate, which is difficult to determine and easy to hide.
While constituting approximately 2.4 percent of the population of the United
States, Jews represented half of the top one hundred Wall Street executives
and about 40 percent of admissions to Ivy League colleges. Lipset and Raab
(1995) note that Jews contribute between one-quarter and one-third of all
political contributions in the United States, including one-half of Democratic
Party contributions and one-fourth of Republican contributions. The general
message of Goldberg's (1996) book Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish
Establishment, is that American Judaism is well organized and lavishly funded.
It has achieved a great deal of power, and it has been successful in achieving
its interests. There is a great deal of consensus on broad Jewish issues,
particularly in the areas of Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries,
immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and
civil liberties (p. 5). Indeed, the consensus on these issues among Jewish
activist organizations and the Jewish intellectual movements reviewed here
despite a great deal of disagreement on other issues is striking. Massive
changes in public policy on these issues beginning with the counter-cultural
revolution of the 1960s coincide with the period of increasing Jewish power
and influence in the United States. Since the 1950s empirical studies of
ethnic hierarchy in the United States have tracked changes in ethnic group
resources, including elite representation (e.g., Alba & Moore 1982; Lemer,
Nagai & Rothman 1996). These studies have often emphasized the
overrepresentation of Protestant whites in corporate hierarchies and the
military, but have failed to take into consideration group differences in
commitment and organization. Salter (1998b) provides a theoretically based
assessment of Jewish influence relative to African Americans and gentile
European Americans based on Blalock's (1967, 1989) model of group power as a
function of resources multiplied by mobilization. Jews are far more mobilized
than these other ethnic populations (one hesitates calling gentile European
Americans a "group"). For example, while specifically ethnic organizations
devoted to the ethnic interests of gentile European Americans are essentially
political fringe groups with meager funding and little influence on the
mainstream political process, Salter notes that the America-Israel Public
Affairs Committee ranked second out the 120 most powerful lobbies as rated by
members of Congress and professional lobbyists, with no other ethnic
organization rated in the top 25. Furthermore, AIPAC is one of the few lobbies
that relies heavily on campaign contributions to win allies. As indicated
above, Jews contribute between one-third and one-half of all campaign money in
federal elections, the donations motivated by "Israel and the broader Jewish
agenda" (Goldberg 1996, 275). Jews are thus over-represented in campaign
contributions by a factor of at least 13 based on their percentage of the
population and are overrepresented by a factor of approximately 6.5 if
adjustment is made for their higher average income. In overseas donations, the
Jewish lead is even greater. For example, in the 1920s, before the post --
World War II explosion of Jewish giving to Israel, Jewish Americans may have
given as much as 24 times more per capita to assist overseas Jews than did
Irish Americans to assist Ireland in its struggle for independence from Great
Britain. Yet this was the period of peak Irish ethnic philanthropy (Carroll
1978). The disparity has become much greater since World War II. Salter has
adopted a preliminary conservative estimate of Jewish ethnic mobilization as
four times that of white gentiles, based on comparison of per capita donations
to non-religious ethnic causes. In the Blalock equation influence is affected
not only by mobilization but also by the resources held by the group. Salter
estimates that Jews control approximately 26 percent of the "cybernetic
resources" of the United States (i.e., resources as measured by representation
in key areas such as government, media, finance, academia, corporations, and
entertainment). This average level of resource control reflects both areas of
high (> 40 percent) Jewish representation (e.g., mass media, high finance, the
legal profession, the intellectual elite, entertainment) and low (< 10
percent) Jewish representation (e.g., corporate elite, military leaders,
religious leaders, legislators). The overall estimate is comparable to that
made by Lemer et al. (1996, 20) based on data gathered in the 1970s and 1980s.
Lerner et al. arrive at a 23 percent overall Jewish representation in American
elites. The results also parallel levels of Jewish overrepresentation in other
societies, as in early twentieth-century Germany where Jews constituting
approximately one percent of the population controlled approximately 20
percent of the economy (Mosse 1987, 1989) and also had a dominating influence
on the media and the production of culture (Deak 1968, 28; Laqueur 1974, 73).
Substitution of these resource and mobilization values into the Blalock
equation yields an estimate that Jewish influence on ethnic policy
(immigration, race policy, foreign policy) is approximately three times the
influence of gentile European Americans. The results are highly robust for
different weightings of resources. Only an "extreme neo-Marxist" weighting of
resources (i.e., one that weights only the corporate elite, the legislative
branch of government, the military elite, foundations, and total group income)
brings Jewish influence down to approximate parity of influence with gentile
European Americans. As indicated above, there is a broad Jewish consensus on
such issues as Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration
and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil
liberties. This implies that Jewish influence and Jewish interests dominate
these issues--a result that is highly compatible with the discussion of Jewish
influence on immigration policy discussed Chapter 7 as well as the fact that
all of these areas have seen enormous swings in public policy in accordance
with Jewish interests that coincide with the rise of Jewish influence in the
United States. Salter's estimate that Jewish mobilization may be
conceptualized as several times greater than that of gentile European
Americans is well illustrated by the history of Jewish involvement in
immigration policy: All of the major Jewish organizations were intensively
involved in the battle over restrictive immigration for a period lasting an
entire century despite what must have seemed devastating setbacks. This effort
continues into the contemporary era. As discussed in Chapter 7, opposition to
large-scale immigration of all racial and ethnic groups by large majorities of
the European-derived population as well as the relative apathy of other
groups--even groups such as Italian Americans and Polish Americans that might
be expected to support the immigration of their own peoples--were prominent
features of the history of immigration policy. This "rise of the Jews"--to use
Albert Lindemann's (1997) phrase--has undoubtedly had important effects on
contemporary Western societies. A major theme of the previous chapter is that
high levels of immigration into Western societies conforms to a perceived
Jewish interest in developing nonhomogeneous, culturally and ethnically
pluralistic societies. It is of interest to consider the possible consequences
of such a policy in the long term. In recent years there has been an
increasing rejection among intellectuals and minority ethnic activists of the
idea of creating a melting pot society based on assimilation among ethnic
groups (see, e.g., Schlesinger 1992). Cultural and ethnic differences are
emphasized in these writings, and ethnic assimilation and homogenization are
viewed in negative terms. The tone of these writings is reminiscent of the
views of many late-nineteenth- and early -twentieth-century Jewish
intellectuals who rejected the assimilationist effects of Reform Judaism in
favor of Zionism or a return to a more extreme form of cultural separatism
such as Conservative or Orthodox Judaism. The movement toward ethnic
separatism is of considerable interest from an evolutionary point of view.
Between-group competition and monitoring of outgroups have been a
characteristic of Jewish-gentile interactions not only in the West but also in
Muslim societies, and there are examples of between-group competition and
conflict too numerous to mention in other parts of the world. Historically,
ethnic separatism, as seen in the history of Judaism, has been a divisive
force within societies. It has on several occasions unleashed enormous
intrasocietal hatred and distrust, ethnically based warfare, expulsions,
pogroms, and attempts at genocide. Moreover, there is little reason to suppose
that the future will be much different. At the present time there are
ethnically based conflicts on every continent, and clearly the establishment
of Israel has not ended ethnically based conflict for Jews returning from the
diaspora. Indeed, my review of the research on contact between more or less
impermeable groups in historical societies strongly suggests a general rule
that between-group competition and monitoring of ingroup and outgroup success
are the norm. These results are highly consistent with psychological research
on social identity processes reviewed in SAID (Ch. 1). From an evolutionary
perspective, these results confirm the expectation that ethnic self-interest
is indeed important in human affairs, and obviously ethnicity remains a common
source of group identity in the contemporary world. People appear to be aware
of group membership and have a general tendency to devalue and compete with
outgroups. Individuals are also keenly aware of the relative standing of their
own group in terms of resource control and relative reproductive success. They
are also willing to take extraordinary steps to achieve and retain economic
and political power in defense of these group imperatives. Given the
assumption of ethnic separatism, it is instructive to think of the
circumstances that would, from an evolutionary perspective, minimize group
conflict. Theorists of cultural pluralism such as Horace Kallen (1924)
envision a scenario in which different ethnic groups retain their distinctive
identity in the context of complete political equality and economic
opportunity. The difficulty with this scenario from an evolutionary
perspective (or even a common sense perspective) is that no provision is made
for the results of competition for resources and reproductive success within
the society. Indeed, the results of ethnic strife were apparent in Kallen's
day, but "Kallen lifted his eyes above the strife that swirled around him to
an ideal realm where diversity and harmony coexist" (Higham 1984, 209). In the
best of circumstances one might suppose that separated ethnic groups would
engage in absolute reciprocity with each other, so that there would be no
differences in terms of economic exploitation of one ethnic group by the
other. Moreover, there would be no differences on any measure of success in
society, including social class membership, economic role (e.g., producer
versus consumer; creditor versus debtor; manager versus worker), or fertility
between the separated ethnic groups. All groups would have approximately equal
numbers and equal political power; or if there were different numbers,
provisions would exist to ensure that minorities would retain equitable
representation in terms of the markers of social and reproductive success.
Such conditions would minimize hostility between the groups because
attributing one's status to the actions of the other groups would be
difficult. Given the existence of ethnic separatism, however, it would still
be in the interests of each group to advance its own interests at the expense
of the other groups. All things being equal, a given ethnic group would be
better off if it ensured that the other groups had fewer resources, lower
social status, lower fertility, and proportionately less political power than
itself. The hypothesized steady state of equality therefore implies a set of
balance-of-power relation-ships--each side constantly checking to make sure
that the other is not cheating; each side constantly looking for ways to
dominate and exploit by any means possible; each side willing to compromise
only because of the other sides's threat of retaliation; each side willing to
cooperate at cost only if forced to do so by, for example, the presence of
external threat. Clearly, any type of cooperation that involves true altruism
toward the other group could not be expected. Thus the ideal situation of
absolute equality in resource control and reproductive success would certainly
require a great deal of monitoring and undoubtedly be characterized by a great
deal of mutual suspicion. In the real world, however, even this rather grim
ideal is highly unlikely. In the real world, ethnic groups differ in their
talents and abilities; they differ in their numbers, fertility, and the extent
to which they encourage parenting practices conducive to resource acquisition;
they also differ in the resources held at any point in time and in their
political power. Equality or proportionate equity would be extremely difficult
to attain or to maintain after it has been achieved without extraordinary
levels of monitoring and without extremely intense social controls to enforce
ethnic quotas on the accumulation of wealth, admission to universities, access
to high status jobs, and so on. Because ethnic groups have differing talents
and abilities and differing parenting styles, variable criteria for qualifying
and retaining jobs would be required depending on ethnic group membership.
Moreover, achieving parity between Jews and other ethnic groups would entail a
high level of discrimination against individual Jews for admission to
universities or access to employment opportunities and even entail a large
taxation on Jews to counter the Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth,
since at present Jews are vastly over-represented among the wealthy and the
successful in the United States. This would especially be the case if Jews
were distinguished as a separate ethnic group from gentile European Americans.
Indeed, the final evolution of many of the New York Intellectuals from
Stalinism was to become neoconservatives who have been eloquent opponents of
affirmative action and quota mechanisms for distributing resources. (Sachar
[1992, 818ff] mentions Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol,
Nathan Glazer, Charles Krauthammer, Norman Podhoretz, and Earl Raab as opposed
to affirmative action.) Jewish organizations (including the ADL, the
AJCommittee, and the AJCongress) have taken similar positions Sachar (1992,
818ff). In the real world, therefore, extraordinary efforts would have to be
made to attain this steady state of ethnic balance of power and resources.
Interestingly, the ideology of Jewish-gentile coexistence has sometimes
included the idea that the different ethnic groups develop a similar
occupational profile and implicitly control resources in proportion to their
numbers. In medieval France, for example, Louis IX's ordinance of 1254
prohibited Jews from engaging in money-lending at interest and encouraged them
to live by manual labor or trade (see Richard 1992, 162). The dream of German
assimilationists during the nineteenth century was that the occupational
profile of Jews after emancipation would mirror that of the gentiles--a
"utopian expectation . . shared by many, Jews and non-Jews alike" (Katz 1986,
67). Efforts were made to decrease the percentage of Jews involved in trade
and increase the percentages involved in agriculture and artisanry. In the
event, however, the result of emancipation was that Jews were vastly
over-represented among the economic and cultural elite, and this
overrepresentation was a critical feature of German anti-Semitism from 1870 to
1933 (see SAID, Ch. 5). Similarly, during the 1920s when the United States was
attempting to come to grips with Jewish competition at prestigious private
universities, plans were proposed in which each ethnic group received a
percentage of placements at Harvard reflecting the percentage of racial and
national groups in the United States (Sachar 1992, 329). Similar
policies--uniformly denounced by Jewish organizations--developed during the
same period throughout Central Europe (Hagen 1996). Such policies certainly
reflect the importance of ethnicity in human affairs, but levels of social
tension are bound to be chronically high. Moreover, there is a considerable
chance of ethnic warfare even were precise parity achieved through intensive
social controls: As indicated above, it is always in the interests of any
ethnic group to obtain hegemony over the others. If one adopts a cultural
pluralism model involving free competition for resources and reproductive
success, differences between ethnic groups are inevitable; from an
evolutionary perspective, there is the very strong prediction that such
differences will result in animosity from the losing groups. After
emancipation there was a powerful tendency for upward mobility among Jews in
Western societies, including a large overrepresentation in the professions as
well as in business, politics, and the production of culture. Concomitantly
there were outbreaks of anti-Semitism originating often among groups that felt
left behind in this resource competition or who felt that the culture being
left behind in this resource competition or who felt that the culture being
created did not meet their interests. If the history of Judaism tells us
anything, it is that self-imposed ethnic separatism tends to lead to resource
competition based on group membership, and consequent hatred, expulsions, and
persecutions. Assuming that ethnic differences in talents and abilities exist,
the supposition that ethnic separatism could be a stable situation without
ethnic animosity requires either a balance of power situation maintained with
intense social controls, as described above, or it requires that at least some
ethnic groups be unconcerned that they are losing in the competition. I regard
this last possibility as unlikely in the long run. That an ethnic group would
be unconcerned with its own eclipse and domination is certainly not expected
by an evolutionist or, indeed, by advocates of social justice whatever their
ideology. Nevertheless, this is in fact the implicit morality of the criticism
by several historians of the behavior of the Spanish toward the Jews and
Marranos during the Inquisition and the Expulsion, as, for example, in the
writings of Benzion Netanyahu (1995), who at times seems openly contemptuous
of the inability of the Spaniards to compete with the New Christians without
resorting to the violence of the Inquisition. From this perspective, the
Spaniards should have realized their inferiority and acquiesced in being
economically, socially, and politically dominated by another ethnic group.
Such a "morality" is unlikely to appeal to the group losing the competition,
and from an evolutionary perspective, this is not in the least surprising.
Goldwin Smith (1894/1972, 261) made a similar point a century ago:"A community
has a right to defend its territory and its national integrity against an
invader whether his weapon be the sword or foreclosure. In the territories of
the Italian Republics the Jews might so far as we see, have bought land and
taken to farming had they pleased. But before this they had thoroughly taken
to trade. Under the falling Empire they were the great slave-traders, buying
captives from barbarian invaders and probably acting as general brokers of
spoils at the same time. They entered England in the train of the Norman
conqueror. There was, no doubt, a perpetual struggle between their craft and
the brute force of the feudal populations. But what moral prerogative has
craft over force? Mr. Arnold White tells the Russians that, if they would let
Jewish intelligence have free course, Jews would soon fill all high
employments and places of power to the exclusion of the natives, who now hold
them. Russians are bidden to acquiesce and rather to rejoice in this by
philosophers, who would perhaps not relish the cup if it were commended to
their own lips. The law of evolution, it is said, prescribes the survival of
the fittest. To which the Russian boor may reply, that if his force beats the
fine intelligence of the Jew the fittest will survive and the law of evolution
will be fulfilled. It was force rather than fine intelligence which decided on
the field of Zama that the Latin, not the Semite, should rule the ancient and
mould the modern world." Ironically, many intellectuals who absolutely reject
evolutionary thinking and any imputation that genetic self-interest might be
important in human affairs also favor policies that are rather obviously
self-interestedly ethnocentric, and they often condemn the self-interested
ethnocentric behavior of other groups, particularly any indication that the
European-derived majority in the United States is developing a cohesive group
strategy and high levels of ethnocentrism in reaction to the group strategies
of others. The ideology of minority group ethnic separatism and the implicit
legitimization of group competition for resources, as well as the more modern
idea that ethnic group membership should be a criterion for resource
acquisition, must be seen for what they are: blueprints for group evolutionary
strategies. The history of the Jews must be seen as a rather tragic commentary
on the results of such group strategies. The importance of group-based
competition cannot be overstated. I believe it is highly unlikely that Western
societies based on individualism and democracy can long survive the
legitimization of competition between impermeable groups in which group
membership is determined by ethnicity. The discussion in SAID (Chs. 3-5)
strongly suggests that ultimately group strategies are met by group
strategies, and that societies become organized around cohesive, mutually
exclusionary groups. Indeed, the recent multicultural movement may be viewed
as tending toward a profoundly non-Western form of social organization that
has historically been much more typical of Middle Eastern segmentary societies
centered around discrete homogeneous groups. However, unlike in the
multicultural ideal, in these societies there are pronounced relations of
dominance and subordination. Whereas democracy appears to be quite foreign to
such segmentary societies, Western societies, uniquely among the stratified
societies of the world, have developed individualistic democratic and
republican political institutions. Moreover, major examples of Western
collectivism, including German National Socialism and Iberian Catholicism
during the period of the Inquisition, have been characterized by intense
anti-Semitism. There is thus a significant possibility that individualistic
societies are unlikely to survive the intra-societal group-based competition
that has become increasingly common and intellectually respectable in the
United States. I believe that in the United States we are presently heading
down a volatile path--a path that leads to ethnic warfare and to the
development of collectivist, authoritarian, and racialist enclaves. Although
ethnocentric beliefs and behavior are viewed as morally and intellectually
legitimate only among ethnic minorities in the United States, the theory and
the data presented in SAID indicate that the development of greater
ethnocentrism among Euro-pean-derived peoples is a likely result of present
trends. One way of analyzing the Frankfurt School and psychoanalysis is that
they have attempted with some success to erect, in the terminology of Paul
Gottfried (1998) and Christopher Lasch (1991), a "therepeutic state" that
pathologizes the ethnocentrism of European-derived peoples as well as their
attempts to retain cultural and demographic dominance. However, ethnocentrism
on the part of the European-derived majority in the United States is a likely
outcome of the increasingly group-structured contemporary social and political
landscape--likely because evolved psychological mechanisms in humans appear to
function by making ingroup and outgroup membership more salient in situations
of group-based resource competition (see SAID, Ch. 1). The effort to overcome
these inclinations thus necessitates applying to Western societies a massive
"therapeutic" intervention in which manifestations of majoritarian
ethnocentrism are combated at several levels, but first and foremost by
promoting the ideology that such manifestations are an indication of
psychopathology and a cause for ostracism, shame, psychiatric intervention,
and counseling. One may expect that as ethnic conflict continues to escalate
in the United States, increasingly desperate attempts will be made to prop up
the ideology of multiculturalism with sophisticated theories of the
psychopathology of majority group ethnocentrism, as well as with the erection
of police state controls on nonconforming thought and behavior. I suppose that
a major reason some non-Jewish racial and ethnic groups adopt multiculturalism
is that they are not able to compete successfully in an individualistic
economic and cultural arena. As a result, multiculturalism has quickly become
identified with the idea that each group ought to receive a proportional
measure of economic and cultural success. As indicated above, the resulting
situation may oppose Jewish interests. Because of their high intelligence and
resource-acquisition ability, Jews do not benefit from affirmative action
policies and other group-based entitlements commonly advocated by minority
groups with low social status. Jews thus come into conflict with other
ethnically identified minority groups who use multiculturalism for their own
purposes. (Nevertheless, because of their competitive advantage within the
white, European-derived group with which they are currently classified, Jews
may perceive themselves as benefiting from policies designed to dilute the
power of the European-derived group as a whole on the assumption that they
would not suffer any appreciable effect. Indeed, despite the official
opposition to group-based preferences among Jewish organizations, Jews voted
for an anti-affirmative action ballot measure in California in markedly lower
percentages than did other European-derived groups.) Although multiculturalist
ideology was invented by Jewish intellectuals to rationalize the continuation
of separatism and minority-group ethnocentrism in a modern Western state,
several of the recent instantiations of multiculturalism may eventually
produce a monster with negative consequences for Judaism. Irving Louis
Horowitz (1993, 89) notes the emergence of anti-Semitism in academic sociology
as these departments are increasingly staffed by individuals who are committed
to ethnic political agendas and who view Jewish domination of sociology in
negative terms. There is a strong strain of anti-Semitism emanating from some
multiculturalist ideologues, especially from Afrocentric ideologues (Alexander
1992), and Cohen (1998, 45) finds that "multiculturalism is often identified
nowadays with a segment of the left that has, to put it bluntly, a Jewish
problem." Recently the Nation of Islam, led by Louis Farrakhan, has adopted an
overt anti-Semitic rhetoric. Afrocentrism is often associated with racialist
ideologies, such as those of Molefi Asante (1987), in which ethnicity is
viewed as the morally proper basis of self--identity and self-esteem and in
which a close connection exists between ethnicity and culture. Western ideals
of objectivity, universalism, individualism, rationality, and the scientific
method are rejected because of their ethnic origins. Asante accepts a naive
racialist theory in which Africans (the "sun people") are viewed as superior
to Europeans (the "ice people"). Such movements mirror similar Jewish
ideologies that rationalize a powerful concern with Jewish ethnicity and
attempt to produce feelings of ethnic superiority within the group. These
ideologies have been common throughout Jewish intellectual history, the most
enduring embodied in the idea of chosenness and the "light of the nations"
concept. SAID (Ch. 7) reviewed evidence indicating that Jewish historians and
intellectuals, beginning in the ancient world, have often attempted to show
that gentile cultural influences have had specifically Jewish precedents or
even that various gentile philosophers and artists were actually Jews. This
tradition has been carried on recently by two Sephardic Jews, Martin Bernal
(1987) in his Black Athena and Jose Faur (1992) in his In the Shadow of
History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity. Indeed, there may well
be a general trend since the Enlightenment in which Jewish intellectuals have
been at the vanguard of secular political movements, such as the movement for
cultural pluralism, intended to serve Jewish interests as well as appeal to
segments of the gentile population. Also apparent is a trend such that
eventually these movements fractionate, the result of anti-Semitism within the
very segment of the gentile population to which the ideology attempts to
appeal, and Jews abandon these movements and seek to pursue their interests by
other means. Thus it has been noted here that Jews have played a prominent
role in the political left in this century. We have also seen that as a result
of anti-Semitism among gentiles on the left and on the part of Communist
governments, eventually Jews either abandoned the left or they developed their
own brand of leftism in which leftist universalism was compatible with the
primacy of Jewish identity and interests.' Gore Vidal (1986) is a prominent
example of a gentile leftist intellectual who has been highly critical of the
role of neoconservative Jews in facilitating the U.S. military buildup of the
1980s and allying themselves with conservative political forces to aid
Israel--charges interpreted as implying anti-Semitism because of the
implication that American Jews place the interests of Israel above American
interests (Podhoretz 1986). Vidal also suggests that neoconservatism is
motivated by the desire of Jews to make an alliance with gentile elites as a
defense against possible anti-Semitic movements emerging during times of
economic crisis. Indeed, fear of anti-Semitism on the left has been the major
impetus for founding the neoconservative movement (see Gottfried 1993,
80)--the final resting point of many of the New York Intellectuals whose
intellectual and cumulative effect of neoconservatism and its current hegemony
over the conservative political movement in the United States (achieved partly
by its large influence on the media and among foundations) has been to shift
the conservative movement toward the center and, in effect, to define the
limits of conservative legitimacy. Clearly, these limits of conservative
legitimacy are defined by whether they conflict with specifically Jewish group
interests in a minimally restrictive immigration policy, support for Israel,
global democracy, opposition to quotas and affirmative action, and so on. As
indicated in William F. Buckley's (1992) In Search of Anti-Semitism, however,
the alliance between gentile paleoconservatives and Jewish neoconservatives in
the United States is fragile, with several accusations of anti-Semitism among
the paleoconservatives. Much of the difficulty derives from the tension
between the nationalist tendencies of an important segment of U.S.
conservatism and the perceptions of at least some gentile conservatives that
Jewish neoconservatism is essentially a device for pursuing narrow Jewish
sectarian interests, particularly with regard to Israel, church-state
separation, and affirmative action. Moreover, the neoconservative commitment
to many aspects of the conservative social agenda is half-hearted at best
(Gottfried 1993). Most importantly, neoconservatives pursue what is
essentially an ethnic agenda regarding immigration while opposing the
ethnocentric interests of the paleoconservatives in retaining their ethnic
hegemony. The ethnic agenda of neoconservatism can also be seen in their
promotion of the idea that the United States should pursue a highly
interventionist foreign policy aimed at global democracy and the interests of
Israel rather than aimed at the specific national interests of the United
States (Gottfried 1993). Neoconservatism has also provided a Jewish influence
on the American conservative movement to counterbalance the strong tendency
for Jews to support liberal and leftist political candidates. Jewish ethnic
interests are best served by influencing both major parties toward a consensus
on Jewish issues, and, as indicated above, neoconservatism has served to
define the limits of conservative legitimacy in a manner that conforms to
Jewish interests. As anti-Semitism develops, Jews begin to abandon the very
movements for which they originally provided the intellectual impetus. This
phenomenon may also occur in the case of multiculturalism. Indeed, many of the
most prominent opponents of multiculturalism are Jewish neoconservatives, as
well as organizations such as the National Association of Scholars (NAS),
which have a large Jewish membership. (The NAS is an organization of academics
opposed to some of the more egregious excesses of feminism and
multiculturalism in the university.) It may well be the case, therefore, that
the Jewish attempt to link up with secular political ideologies that appeal to
gentiles is doomed in the long run. Ginsberg (1993, 224ff) essentially makes
this point when he notes that there is increasing evidence for anti-Semitism
among American liberals, conservatives, and populist radicals. The case of
multiculturalism is particularly problematic as a Jewish strategy. In this
case one might say that Jews want to have their cake and eat it too. "Jews are
often caught between fervent affirmation of the Enlightenment and criticism of
it. Many Jews believe that the replacement of the Enlightenment ideal of
universalism with a politics of difference and a fragmented 'multiculture'
would constitute a threat to Jewish achievement. At the same time, they
recognize the dangers of a homogeneous 'monoculture' for Jewish
particularity... . [Jews] seek to rescue the virtues of the Enlightenment from
the shards of its failures and salvage an inclusive vision from
multiculturalism, where fragmentation and divisiveness now reign" (Biale,
Galchinsky, & Heschel 1998, 7). Multicultural societies with their consequent
fragmentation and chronic ethnic tension are unlikely to meet Jewish needs in
the long run even if they do ultimately subvert the demographic and cultural
dominance of the peoples of European origin in lands where they have been
dominant. This in turn suggests a fundamental and irresolvable friction
between Judaism and prototypical Western political and social structure.
Certainly the very long history of anti-Semitism in Western societies and its
recurrence time and again after periods of latency suggests such a view. The
incompatibility of Judaism and Western culture can also be seen in the
tendency for individualistic Western cultures to break down Jewish group
cohesiveness. As Arthur Ruppin (1934, 339) noted earlier in the century, all
modern manifestations of Judaism, from neo-Orthodoxy to Zionism, are responses
to the Enlightenment's corrosive effects on Judaism--a set of defensive
structures erected against "the destructive influence of European
civilization." And at a theoretical level, there is a very clear rationale for
supposing that Western individualism is incompatible with group-based resource
conflict that has been the consistent consequence of the emergence of a
powerful Judaism in Western societies (see SAID, Chs. 3--5). One aspect of
this friction is well articulated in Alan Ryan's (1994, 11) discussion of the
"latent contradiction" in the politics of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles
Murray, the authors of the highly controversial volume The Bell Curve:
Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Ryan states, "Herrnstein
essentially wants the world in which clever Jewish kids or their equivalent
make their way out of their humble backgrounds and end up running Goldman
Sachs or the Harvard physics department, while Murray wants the Midwest in
which he grew up--a world in which the local mechanic didn't care two cents
whether he was or wasn't brighter than the local math teacher. The trouble is
that the first world subverts the second, while the second feels
claustrophobic to the beneficiaries of the first." The social structure whose
acceptance is here attributed to Murray envisions a moderately individualistic
society, a society that is meritocratic and hierarchical but also cohesive and
culturally and ethnically homogeneous. It is a society with harmony among the
social classes and with social controls on extreme individualism among the
elite. There has been a powerful Western tendency to develop such societies,
beginning at least in the Middle Ages, but also present, I believe, in the
classical Roman civilization of the Republic. The ideal of hierarchic harmony
is central to the social program of the Catholic Church beginning during the
late Roman Empire and reaching its pinnacle during the High Middle Ages
(MacDonald 1995c; SAID, Ch. 5). This ideal is apparent also in a powerful
strand of German intellectual history beginning with Herder in the eighteenth
century. A very central feature of this prototypical Western hierarchical
harmony has been the social imposition of monogamy as a form of reproductive
leveling that dampens the association between wealth and reproductive success.
From an evolutionary perspective, Western societies achieve their cohesion
because hierarchical social relationships are significantly divorced from
reproductive consequences. Such a world is threatened from above by the
domination of an individualistic elite without commitment to responsible
lower-status individuals who may have lesser intellectual ability, talent, or
financial resources. It is threatened from within by the development of a
society constituted by a set of ethnically divided, chronically competing,
highly impermeable groups as represented historically by Judaism and currently
envisioned as the model for society by the proponents of multiculturalism. And
it is threatened from below by an increasing underclass of people with the
attributes described by Herrnstein and Murray: intellectually incompetent and
insufficiently conscientious to hold most kinds of job; irresponsible and
incompetent as parents; prone to requiring public assistance; prone to
criminal behavior, psychiatric disorders, and substance abuse; and prone to
rapid demographic increase. Such people are incapable of contributing
economically, socially, or culturally to a late-twentieth-century society or,
indeed, to any human civilization characterized by a substantial degree of
reciprocity, voluntarism and democracy. Given that the continued existence of
Judaism implies that the society will be composed of competing, more or less
impermeable groups, the neoconservative condemnation of multiculturalism must
be viewed as lacking in intellectual consistency. The neoconservative
prescription for society embraces a particular brand of multiculturalism in
which the society as a whole will be culturally fragmented and socially
atomistic. These social attributes not only allow Jewish upward mobility, but
also are incompatible with the development of highly cohesive, anti-Semitic
groups of gentiles; they are also incompatible with group-based entitlements
and affirmative action programs that would necessarily discriminate against
Jews. As Horowitz (1993, 86) notes, "High levels of cultural fragmentation
coupled with religious options are likely to find relatively benign forms of
anti-Semitism coupled with a stable Jewish condition. Presumed Jewish
cleverness or brilliance readily emerges under such pluralistic conditions,
and such cleverness readily dissolves with equal suddenness under politically
monistic or totalitarian conditions." Jewish neoconservatives readily accept a
radically individualistic society in which Jews would be expected to become
economically, politically, and culturally dominant while having minimal
allegiance to the lower (disproportionately gentile) social classes. Such a
society is likely to result in extreme social pressures as the responsible
lower middle classes are placed in an increasingly precarious economic and
political situation. As in the case of the intellectual activity of the
Frankfurt School, the Jewish neoconservative prescription for the society as a
whole is radically opposed to the strategy for the ingroup. Traditional
Judaism, and to a considerable extent contemporary Judaism, obtained its
strength not only from its intellectual and entrepreneurial elite but also
from the unshakable allegiance of responsible, hardworking, lower-status Jews
of lesser talent whom they patronized. And it must be stressed here that
historically, the popular movements that have attempted to restore this
prototypical Western state of hierarchic harmony, in opposition to the
exploitation of individualistic elites and the divisiveness of intergroup
conflict, have often had intensely anti-Semitic overtones. Moreover, to a
considerable extent the font et origo of the social policies and cultural
shifts that have resulted in the dangerous situation now rapidly developing in
the United States has been the Jewish-dominated intellectual and political
movements described in this volume. I have attempted to document the role of
those movements, particularly the 1960s leftist political and intellectual
movement, in subjecting Western culture to radical criticism; it is the legacy
of this cultural movement that has taken the lead in providing the
intellectual basis of the multiculturalist movement and in rationalizing
social policies that expand the underclass and expand the demographic and
cultural presence of non-European peoples in Western societies. From the
standpoint of these leftist critics, the Western ideal of hierarchic harmony
and assimilation is perceived as an irrational, romantic, and mystical ideal.
Western civility is nothing more than a thin veneer masking a reality of
exploitation and conflict---"a vast ecclesia super cloacum" (Cuddihy 1974,
l42). It is interesting in this regard that a basic strand of sociological
theory beginning with Marx has been to emphasize conflict between social
classes rather than social harmony. For example, Irving Louis Horowitz (1993,
75) notes that one result of the massive influence of Jewish intellectuals on
American sociology beginning in the 1930s was that--"the sense of America as a
consensual experience gave way to a sense of America as a series of
conflicting definitions," including a heightened concern with ethnicity in
general. Historically, this conflict conception of social structure has
typically been combined with the idea that the inevitable struggle between
social classes can be remedied only by the complete leveling of economic and
social outcomes. This latter ideal can then be attained only by adopting a
radical environmentalist perspective on the origins of individual differences
in economic success and other cultural attainments and by blaming any
individual shortcomings on unequal environments. Because this radical
environmentalism is scientifically unfounded, the social policies based on
this ideology tend to result in high levels of social conflict as well as an
increase in the prevalence of intellectual incompetence and social pathology.
From an evolutionary perspective, the prototypical Western social organization
of hierarchic harmony and muted individualism is inherently unstable, a
situation that undoubtedly contributes to the intensely dynamic nature of
Western history. It has often been remarked that in the history of China
nothing ever really changed. Dynasties characterized by intensive polygyny and
moderate to extreme political despotism came and went, but there were no
fundamental social changes over a very long period of historical time. The
data reviewed by Betzig (1986) indicate that much the same can be said about
the history of political organization in other stratified human societies. In
the West, however, the prototypical state of social harmony described above is
chronically unstable. The unique initiating conditions involving a significant
degree of reproductive leveling have resulted in a highly dynamic historical
record (see MacDonald 1995c). The most common threat to hierarchic harmony has
been the individualistic behavior of elites--a tendency that hardly surprises
an evolutionist. Thus the early phases of industrialization were characterized
by the unraveling of the social fabric and high levels of exploitation and
conflict among the social classes. As another example, the slavery of Africans
was a short-term benefit to an individualistic elite of southern aristocrats
in the United States, but it also resulted in exploitation of the slaves and
has been a long-term calamity for the society as a whole. We have also seen
that Western elites in traditional societies have often actively encouraged
Jewish economic interests to the detriment of other sectors of the native
population, and in several historical eras Jews have been the instruments of
individualistic behavior among gentile elites thus facilitating such
individualistic behavior. Of considerable importance to the history of U.S.
immigration policy has been the collaboration between Jewish activists and
elite gentile industrialists interested in cheap labor, at least in the period
prior to 1924. Recently, writers such as Peter Brimelow (1995, 229--232) and
Paul Gottfried (1998) have called attention to an elite 'New Class' of
internationalists who are opposed to the nation-state based on ethnic ties and
highly favorable to immigration that decreases the ethnic homogeneity of
traditional societies. The self-interest of this group is to cooperate with
similar individuals in other countries rather than to identify with the lower
levels of their own society. Although this type of internationalism is highly
congruent with a Jewish ethnic agenda--and Jews are undoubtedly
disproportionately represented among this group, gentile members of the New
Class must be seen as pursuing a narrowly individualistic agenda. The
individualism of elites has not been the only threat to Western hierarchic
harmony, however. As recounted in SAID, this ideal has been shattered in
critical historical eras by intense group conflict between Judaism and
segments of gentile society. In the present age, perhaps for the first time in
history, this hierarchic harmony is threatened by the development of an
underclass whose membership consists disproportionately of racial and ethnic
minority members and which has also resulted in intense group-based conflict.
In particular, it is the large disproportion of African Americans in the
American underclass that makes any political solution to this threat to
hierarchic harmony problematic. I have suggested that there is a fundamental
and irresolvable friction between Judaism and prototypical Western political
and social structure. The present political situation in the United States
(and several other Western countries) is so dangerous because of the very real
possibility that the Western European tendency toward hierarchic harmony has a
biological basis. The greatest mistake of the Jewish-dominated intellectual
movements described in this volume is that they have attempted to establish
the moral superiority of societies that embody a preconceived moral ideal
(compatible with the continuation of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy)
rather than advocate social structures based on the ethical possibilities of
naturally occurring types. In the twentieth century many millions of people
have been killed in the attempt to establish Marxist societies based on the
ideal of complete economic and social leveling, and many more millions of
people have been killed as a result of the failure of Jewish assimilation into
European societies. Although many intellectuals continue to attempt to alter
fundamental Western tendencies toward assimilation, muted individualism, and
hierarchic harmony, there is a real possibility that these Western ideals are
not only more achievable but also profoundly ethical. Uniquely among all
stratified cultures of the world, prototypical Western societies have provided
the combination of a genuine sense of belonging, a large measure of access to
reproductive opportunities, and the political participation of all social
classes combined with the possibilities of meritocratic upward social
mobility. As an evolutionist, one must ask what the likely genetic
consequences of this sea change in American culture are likely to be. An
important consequence--and one likely to have been an underlying motivating
factor in the countercultural revolution--may well be to facilitate the
continued genetic distinctiveness of the Jewish gene pool in the United
States. The ideology of multiculturalism may be expected to increasingly
compartmentalize groups in American society, with long-term beneficial
consequences on continuation of the essential features of traditional Judaism
as a group evolutionary strategy. There is increasing consensus among Jewish
activists that traditional forms of Judaism are far more effective in ensuring
long-term group continuity than semi-assimilationist, semi-cryptic strategies
such as Reform Judaism or secular Judaism. Reform Judaism is becoming steadily
more conservative, and there is a major effort within all segments of the
Jewish community to prevent intermarriage (e.g., Abrams 1997; Dershowitz 1997;
see pp. 244-245). Moreover, as discussed in several parts of this book, Jews
typically perceive themselves to benefit from a nonhomogeneous culture in
which they appear as only one among many ethnic groups where there is no
possibility of the development of a homogeneous national culture that might
exclude Jews. In addition, there may well be negative genetic consequences for
the European-derived peoples of the United States and especially for the
"common people of the South and West" (Higham I 984, 49)--that is, for
lower-middle-class Caucasians derived from Northern and Western Europe--whose
representatives fought a desperate and prolonged political battle against the
present immigration policy. Indeed, we have seen that a prominent theme of the
New York Intellectuals as well as the Authoritarian Personality studies was
the intellectual and moral inferiority of traditional American culture,
particularly rural American culture. James Webb (1995) notes that it is the
descendants of the WASPS who settled the West and South who "by and large did
the most to lay out the infrastructure of this country, quite often suffering
educational and professional regression as they tamed the wilderness, built
the towns, roads and schools, and initiated a democratic way of life that
later white cultures were able to take advantage of without paying the price
of pioneering. Today they have the least, socioeconomically, to show for these
contributions. And if one would care to check a map, they are from the areas
now evincing the greatest resistance to government practices." The war goes
on, but it is easy to see who is losing. The demographic rise of the
underclass resulting from the triumph of the 1960s counter-cultural revolution
implies that European-derived genes and gene frequencies will become less
common compared to those derived from the African and the Latin American gene
pools. On the other end of the IQ--reproductive strategy distribution,
immigrants from East Asian countries are out-competing whites, especially of
the lower-middle and working classes, in gaining admission to universities and
in prestigious, high-income jobs. The long term result will be that the entire
white population (not including Jews) is likely to suffer a social status
decline as these new immigrants become more numerous. (Jews are unlikely to
suffer a decline in social status not only because their mean IQ is well above
that of the East Asians but, more importantly, also because Jewish IQ is
highly skewed toward excelling in verbal skills. The high IQ of East Asians is
skewed toward performance IQ, which makes them powerful competitors in
engineering and technology. See PTSDA, [Ch. 7] and Lynn [1987]. Jews and East
Asians are thus likely to occupy different ecological niches in contemporary
societies.) Lower-middle-class Caucasians, more than any other group, are
expected to lose out. If present trends continue, in the long run the United
States will be dominated by an Asian technocratic elite and a Jewish business,
professional, and media elite. Moreover, the shift to multiculturalism has
coincided with an enormous growth of immigration from non-European-derived
peoples beginning with the Immigration Act of 1965, which favored immigrants
from non-European countries (see Auster 1990; Brimelow 1995). Many of these
immigrants come from non-Western countries where cultural and genetic
segregation are the norm, and within the context of multicultural America,
they are encouraged to retain their own languages and religions and encouraged
to marry within the group. As indicated above, the expected result will be
between-group resource and reproductive competition and increased
vulnerability of democratic and republican political institutions in a context
in which longterm projections indicate that European-derived peoples will no
longer be a majority of the United States by the middle of the next century.
Indeed, one might note that, while the Western Enlightenment has presented
Judaism with its greatest challenge in all of its long history, contemporary
multiculturalism in the context of high levels of immigration of peoples of
all racial and ethnic groups presents the greatest challenge to Western
universalism in its history. The historical record indicates that ethnic
separatism among Caucasian-derived groups has a tendency to collapse within
modern Western societies unless active attempts at ethnic and cultural
segregation are undertaken, as has occurred among Jews. As expected from a
resource-reciprocity point of view (MacDonald 1991, 1995b,c), in the absence
of rigid ethnic barriers, marriage in Western individualist societies tends to
be importantly influenced by a wide range of phenotypic features of the
prospective spouse, including not only genetic commonality but also social
status, personality, common interests, and other points of similarity. This
individualist pattern of marriage decisions has characterized Western Europe
at least since the Middle Ages (e.g., MacFarlane 1986; see PTSDA , Ch. 8). The
result has been a remarkable degree of ethnic assimilation in the United
States among those whose ancestry derives from Europe (Alba 1985). This is
particularly noteworthy because ethnic conflict and violence are on the rise
in Eastern Europe, yet European-derived groups in the United States have an
overwhelming sense of commonality. The long-term result of such processes is
genetic homogenization, a sense of common interest, and the absence of a
powerful source of intrasocietal division. To suppose that the conflict over
immigration has been merely a conflict over the universalist tendencies of
Western culture would, however, be disingenuous. To a great extent the
immigration debate in the United States has always had powerful ethnic
overtones and continues to do so even after the European-derived peoples of
the United States have become assimilated into a Western universalist culture.
The present immigration policy essentially places the United States and other
Western societies "in play" in an evolutionary sense which does not apply to
other nations of the world, where the implicit assumption is that territory is
held by its historically dominant people: Each racial and ethnic group in the
world has an interest in expanding its demographic and political presence in
Western societies and can be expected to do so if given the opportunity.
Notice that American Jews have had no interest in proposing that immigration
to Israel should be similarly multiethnic, or that Israel should have an
immigration policy that would threaten the hegemony of Jews. I rather doubt
that Oscar Handlin (1952, 7) would extend his statement advocating immigration
from all ethnic groups into the United States by affirming the principle that
all men, being brothers, are equally capable of being Israelis. I also doubt
that the Synagogue Council of America would characterize Israeli immigration
law as "a gratuitous affront to the peoples of many regions of the world" (PCN
1953, 117). Indeed, the ethnic conflict within Israel indicates a failure to
develop a universalist Western culture. Consider the disparities between
Jewish attitudes regarding multiculturalism in Israel versus the United
States. "From a Jewish viewpoint, rejection of Zionism as an ideology and a
force shaping the state [of Israel] is like rejecting the state itself. The
refined distinction between the state and its character, and that between its
Jewishness and Zionism, are neither understood nor condoned by the Jews. They
are not interested in having Israel as a state, but rather as a Jewish-Zionist
state. . . . While it is legal, but not legitimate, in Israel to reject
publicly or act against Zionism, according to the 1985 amendment of the
election law, one may not run for the Knesset on an election slate which
denies Israel as the state of the Jewish people. (Smooha 1990, 397)" "A
substantial digression from [the principle of equality] is caused by the
special legal status accorded to the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund.
They perform quasi-governmental functions such as planning and funding of new
rural localities, support for cultural enterprises, provision of assistance to
the elderly and other disadvantaged groups, and development and leasing of
lands. Yet by their own constitution, these powerful institutions are obliged
to serve Jews only. . . . Discrimination is also embedded in the Jewish
Religious Services Law which provides for publicly funded religious services
to Jews only. Most of the discrimination is, however, rather covert.(Smooha
1990, 401)" Smooha (1990, 403) also notes that in a 1988 survey, 74 percent of
Israeli Jews said that the state should prefer Jews to Arabs, and 43 percent
favored the denial of the right to vote to Israeli Arab citizens. Whereas
American Jews have been in the forefront of efforts to ensure ethnic diversity
in the United States and other Western societies, 40 percent of the Jewish
respondents agreed that Israel should encourage Israeli Arabs to leave the
country, 37 percent had reservations, and only 23 percent objected to such a
policy. Almost three quarters of Israeli Jews did not want to have an Arab as
a superior in a job. Moreover, immigration to Israel is officially restricted
to Jews. It is also noteworthy that whereas Jews have been on the forefront of
movements to separate church and state in the United States and often
protested lack of religious freedom in the Soviet Union, the Orthodox
rabbinical control of religious affairs in Israel has received only belated
and half-hearted opposition by American Jewish organizations (Cohen 1972, 317)
and has not prevented the all-out support of Israel by American Jews, despite
the fact that Israel's policy is opposite to the polices that Jewish
organizations have successfully pursued in Western democracies. This
phenomenon is an excellent example of the incompatibility of Judaism with
Western forms of social organization, which results in a recurrent gap between
Jewish behavior vis-a-vis its own group strategy and Jewish attempts to
manipulate Western societies to conform to Jewish group interests. At present
the interests of non-European-derived peoples to expand demographically and
politically in the United States are widely perceived as a moral imperative,
whereas the attempts of the European-derived peoples to retain demographic,
political, and cultural control is represented as "racist," immoral, and an
indication of psychiatric disorder. From the perspective of these
European-derived peoples, the prevailing ethnic morality is altruistic and
self-sacrificial. It is unlikely to be viable in the long run, even in an
individualistic society. As we have seen, the viability of a morality of
self-sacrifice is especially problematic in the context of a multicultural
society in which everyone is conscious of group membership and there is
between-group competition for resources. Consider from an evolutionary
perspective the status of the argument that all peoples should be allowed to
immigrate to the United States. One might assert that any opposition to such a
principle should not interest an evolutionist because human group genetic
differences are trivial, so any psychological adaptations that make one resist
such a principle are anachronisms without function in the contemporary world
(much like one's appendix). A Jew maintaining this argument should, to retain
intellectual consistency, agree that the traditional Jewish concern with
endogamy and consanguinity has been irrational. Moreover, such a person should
also believe that Jews ought not attempt to retain political power in Israel
because there is no rational reason to suppose that any particular group
should have power anywhere. Nor should Jews attempt to influence the political
process in the United States in such a manner as to disadvantage another group
or benefit their own. And to be logically consistent, one should also apply
this argument to all those who promote immigration of their own ethnic groups,
the mirror image of group-based opposition to such immigration. Indeed, if
this chain of logic is pursued to its conclusion, it is irrational for anyone
to claim any group interests at all. And if one also rejects the notion of
individual genetic differences, it is also irrational to attempt to further
individual interests, for example, by seeking to immigrate as an individual.
Indeed, if one accepts these assumptions, the notion of genetic consequences
and thus of the possibility of human evolution past and present becomes
irrational; the idea that it is rational is merely an illusion produced
perhaps by psychological adaptations that are without any meaningful
evolutionary function in the contemporary world. One might note that this
ideology is the final conclusion of the anti-evolutionary ideologies reviewed
in this volume. These intellectual movements have asserted that scientific
research shows that any important ethnic differences or individual differences
are the result of environmental variation, and that genetic differences are
trivial. But there is an enormous irony in all of this: If life is truly
without any evolutionary meaning, why have advocates propagated these
ideologies so intensely and with such self-consciously political methods? Why
have many of these same people strongly identified with their own ethnic group
and its interests, and why have many of them insisted on cultural pluralism
and its validation of minority group ethnocentrism as moral absolutes? By
their own assumptions, it is just a meaningless game. Nobody should care who
wins or loses. Of course, deception and self-deception may be involved. I have
noted (p. 195) that a fundamental agenda has been to make the European-derived
peoples of the United States view concern about their own demographic and
cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology. If one
accepts that both within-group and between-group genetic variation remains and
is non-trivial (i.e., if evolution is an ongoing process), then the principle
of relatively unrestricted immigration, at least under the conditions
obtaining in late twentieth-century Western societies, clearly involves
altruism by some individuals and established groups. Nevertheless, although
the success of the intellectual movements reviewed in this volume is an
indication that people can be induced to be altruistic toward other groups, I
rather doubt such altruism will continue if there are obvious signs that the
status and political power of European-derived groups is decreasing while the
power of other groups increases. The prediction, both on theoretical grounds
and on the basis of social identity research, is that as other groups become
increasingly powerful and salient in a multicultural society, the
European-derived peoples of the United States will become increasingly
unified; among these peoples, contemporary divisive influences, such as issues
related to gender and sexual orientation, social class differences, or
religious differences, will be increasingly perceived as unimportant.
Eventually these groups will develop a united front and a collectivist
political orientation vis-a-vis the other ethnic groups. Other groups will be
expelled if possible or partitions will be created, and Western societies will
undergo another period of medievalism. Jewish interests in immigration policy
are an example of conflicts of interest between Jews and gentiles over the
construction of culture. This conflict of interests extends well beyond
immigration policy. There is a growing realization that the counter-cultural
revolution of the 1960s is a watershed event in the history of the United
States. Such a conceptualization is compatible with the work of Roger Smith
(1988), who shows that until the triumph of the cultural pluralist model with
the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, there were three competing
models of American identity: the "liberal" individualist legacy of the
Enlightenment based on "natural rights"; the "republican" ideal of a cohesive,
socially homogeneous society (what I have identified as the prototypical
Western social organization of hierarchic harmony); the "ethnocultural" strand
emphasizing the importance of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity in the development and
preservation of American cultural forms. . From the present perspective no
fundamental conflict exists between the latter two sources of American
identity; social homogeneity and hierarchic harmony may well be best and most
easily achieved with an ethnically homogeneous society of peoples derived from
the European cultural area. Indeed, in upholding Chinese exclusion in the
nineteenth century, Justice Stephen A. Field noted that the Chinese were
unassimilable and would destroy the republican ideal of social homogeneity. As
indicated above, the incorporation of non-European peoples, and especially
peoples derived from Africa, into peculiarly Western cultural forms is
profoundly problematic. As discussed at several points in this volume, the
radical individualism embodied in the Enlightenment ideal of individual rights
is especially problematic as a source of long-term stability in a Western
society because of the danger of invasion and domination by group strategies
such as Judaism and the possibility of the defection of gentile elites from
the ideals represented in the other two models of social organization. These
latter two events are particularly likely to destroy the social cohesiveness
so central to Western forms of social organization. As Smith notes, the
transformations of American society in the post--Civil War era resulted from
the "liberal" cultural ideal "that opposed slavery, favored immigration, and
encouraged enterprise while protecting property rights" and that posed a
severe threat to the collective life at the center of American civilization.
It is this liberal legacy of American civilization that the Jewish
intellectual movements reviewed in this volume have exploited in rationalizing
unrestricted immigration and the loss of social homogeneity represented by the
unifying force of the Christian religion. As Israel Zangwill said in
advocating a Jewish strategy for unrestricted immigration, "tell them they are
destroying American ideals" (see p. 267). The effect has been to create a new
American ideal that is entirely at odds with the historic sources of American
identity: "This ideal carries on the cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and respect
for human liberty of the older liberal tradition, and so it can properly be
termed a modern version of the liberal ideal. It is novel, however, in its
rejection of Lockean liberalism's absolutist natural law elements in favor of
modern philosophic pragmatism and cultural relativism. And one of its chief
theoretical architects, philosopher Horace Kallen, argued that cultural
pluralism better recognizes human sociality, our constitutive attachments to
distinctive ethnic, religious, and cultural groups. It therefore envisions
America as a "democracy of nationalities, cooperating voluntarily and
autonomously through common institutions in the enterprise of self-realization
through the perfection of men according to their kind" (Kallen 1924, 124).
Since all groups and individuals should be guaranteed equal opportunities to
pursue their own destinies, the nation's legacy of legal, racial, ethnic and
gender discriminations is unacceptable according to the cultural pluralist
ideal. At the same time, there must be no effort to transform equality into
uniformity, to insist that all fit into a standard Americanized mold. The
ideal of democratic cultural pluralism finally came to predominance in
American public law in the 1950s and especially the 1960s, finding expression
in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the liberalizing 1965 Immigration and
Naturalization Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, in new programs to provide
educational curricula more attuned to the nation's diverse cultural heritage,
in bilingual ballots and governmental publications, and in affirmative action
measures. (Smith 1988, 246)" Within this perspective, there is tolerance for
different groups but the result is a tendency to "deprecate the importance or
even the existence of a common national identity" (Kallen 1924, 59). Kallen,
of course, was a very strongly identified Jew and a Zionist, and it is not at
all surprising that his cultural ideal for the United States represents a
non-Western form of social organization that conforms to Jewish interests and
compromises the interests of the European-derived peoples of the United
States. It is a social form that guarantees the continued existence of Judaism
as a social category and as a cohesive ethnic group while at the same time,
given the characteristics of Jews, guarantees Jews economic and cultural
pre-eminence. Public policy based on this conceptualization is having the
predictable long-term effect of marginalizing both culturally and
demographically the European-derived peoples of the United States. Because the
European-derived groups are less organized and less cohesive than Jews and
because a therapeutic state has been erected to counter expressions of
European-American ethnocentrism, it raises the distinct possibility that in
the long run European Americans will be fragmented, politically powerless, and
without an effective group identity at all. The conflict of interest between
Jews and gentiles in the construction of culture goes well beyond advocacy of
the multicultural ideal. Because they are much more genetically inclined to a
high-investment reproductive strategy than are gentiles, Jews are able to
maintain their high-investment reproductive strategy even in the absence of
traditional Western cultural supports for high-investment parenting (Ch. 4).
Compared to gentiles, Jews are therefore much better able to expand their
economic and cultural success without these traditional Western cultural
supports. As Higham (1984, 173) notes, the cultural idealization of an
essentially Jewish personal ethic of hedonism, anxiety, and intellectuality
came at the expense of the older rural ethic of asceticism and sexual
restraint. Moreover, traditional Western supports for high-investment
parenting were embedded in religious ideology and, I suppose, are difficult to
achieve in a postreligious environment. Nevertheless, as Podhoretz (1995, 30)
notes, it is in fact the case that Jewish intellectuals, Jewish organizations
like the AJCongress, and Jewish-dominated organizations such as the ACLU have
ridiculed Christian religious beliefs, attempted to undermine the public
strength of Christianity, or have led the fight for lifting restrictions on
pornography. Further, we have seen that psychoanalysis as a Jewish-dominated
intellectual movement has been a central component of this war on gentile
cultural supports for high-investment parenting. Whereas Jews, because of
their powerful genetically influenced propensities for intelligence and
high-investment parenting, have been able to thrive within this cultural
milieu, other sectors of the society have not; the result has been a widening
gulf between the cultural success of Jews and gentiles and a disaster for
society as a whole. The countercultural revolution of the 1960s may well be
incompatible with traditional American freedoms. Traditional American freedoms
such as the First Amendment freedom of speech (deriving from the Enlightenment
liberal strand of American identity) have clearly facilitated specifically
Jewish interests in the construction of culture, interests that conflict with
the possibility of constructing a cohesive society built around
high-investment parenting. Given that the popular media and the current
intellectual environment of universities thrive on the freedom of elites to
produce socially destructive messages, the political movements attempting to
restore the traditional Western cultural supports for high-investment
parenting will undoubtedly be forced to restrict some traditional American
freedoms (see, e.g., Bork 1996). Cultural supports for high-investment
parenting act as external forces of social control that maximize
high-investment parenting among all segments of the population, even those who
for genetic or environmental reasons are relatively disinclined to engage in
such practices (MacDonald 1997, 1998b). Without such cultural controls, it is
absolutely predictable that social disorganization will increase and the
society as a whole will continue to decline. Nevertheless, the continuity of
peculiarly Western forms of social organization will remain a salient concern
even if one ignores issues of ethnic competition entirely. I have emphasized
that there is an inherent conflict between multiculturalism and Western
universalism and individualism. Even were Western universalism to regain its
moral imperative, whether all of humanity is willing or able to participate in
this type of culture remains an open question. Universalism is a European
creation, and it is unknown whether such a culture can be continued over a
long period of time in a society that is not predominantly ethnically
European. When not explicitly advocating multiculturalism, the rhetoric in
favor of immigration has typically assumed a radical environmentalism in which
all humans are portrayed as having the same potentials and as being equally
moldable into functioning members of Western universalist and individualist
societies. This premise is highly questionable. Indeed, one might say that the
present volume in conjunction with PTSDA and SAID is testimony to the
extremely ingrained anti-Western tendencies that occur among human groups.
Given that a great many human cultures bear a strong resemblance to the
collectivist, anti-assimilatory tendencies present in Jewish culture, it is
highly likely that many of our present immigrants are similarly unable or
unwilling to accept the fundamental premises of a universalistic, culturally
homogeneous, individualistic society. Indeed, there is considerable reason to
suppose that Western tendencies toward individualism are unique and based on
evolved psychological adaptations (see PTSDA, Ch. 8). This genetic perspective
proposes that individualism, like many other phenotypes of interest to
evolutionists (MacDonald 1991), shows genetic variation. In PTSDA (Ch. 8) I
speculated that the progenitors of Western populations evolved in isolated
groups with low population density. Such groups would have been common in
northern areas characterized by harsh ecological conditions, such as those
that occurred during the ice age (see Lenz 1931, 657). Under ecologically
adverse circumstances, adaptations are directed more at coping with the
physical environment than at competition with other groups (Southwood 1977,
1981). Such an environment implies less selection pressure for collectivist,
ethnocentric groups as embodied by historical Judaism. Evolutionary
conceptualizations of ethnocentrism emphasize the utility of ethnocentrism in
group competition. Ethnocentrism would be of no importance in combating the
physical environment, and such an environment would not support large groups.
We have seen that Western individualism is intimately entwined with scientific
thinking and social structures based on hierarchic harmony, sexual
egalitarianism, and democratic and republican forms of government. These
uniquely Western tendencies suggest that reciprocity is a deeply ingrained
Western tendency. Western political forms from the democratic and republican
traditions of ancient Greece and Rome to the hierarchic harmony of the Western
Middle Ages and to modern democratic and republican governments assume the
legitimacy of a pluralism of individual interests. Within these social forms
is a tendency to assume the legitimacy of others' interests and perspectives
in a manner that is foreign to collectivist, despotic social structures
characteristic of much of the rest of the world. Another critical component of
the evolutionary basis of individualism is the elaboration of the human
affectional system as an individualistic pair-bonding system, the system that
seemed so strange that it was theorized to be a thin veneer overlaying a deep
psychopathology to a generation of Jewish intellectuals emerging from the
ghetto (Cuddihy 1974, 71). This system is individualistic in the sense that it
is based not on external, group-based social controls or familial dictate but,
rather, on the intrinsically motivated role of romantic love in cementing
reproductive relationships (see pp. 136--139). The issue is important because
Western cultures are typically characterized as relatively individualistic
compared to other societies (Triandis 1995), and there is reason to suppose
that the affectional system is conceptually linked to individualism; that is,
it is a system that tends toward nuclear rather than extended family
organization. Triandis (1990) finds that individualistic societies emphasize
romantic love to a greater extent than do collectivist societies, and Western
cultures have indeed emphasized romantic love more than other cultures (see
PTSDA, 236-245; MacDonald 1995b,c; Money 1980). This system is highly
elaborated in Western cultures in both men and women, and it is
psychometrically linked with empathy, altruism, and nurturance. Individuals
who are very high on this system--predominantly females--are pathologically
prone to altruistic, nurturant and dependent behavior (see MacDonald 1995a).
On an evolutionary account, the relatively greater elaboration of this system
in females is to be expected, given the greater female role in nurturance and
as a discriminating mechanism in relationships of pair bonding. Such a
perspective also accounts for the much-commented-on gender gap in political
behavior in which females are more prone to voting for political candidates
favoring liberal positions on social issues. Women more than men also endorse
political stances that equalize rather than accentuate differences between
individuals and groups (Pratto, Stallworth & Sidanius 1997). In ancestral
environments this system was highly adaptive, resulting in a tendency toward
pair bonding and high-investment parenting, as well as intrinsically motivated
relationships of close friendship and trust. This system continues to be
adaptive in the modern world in its role in underlying high-investment
parenting, but it is easy to see that the relative hypertrophy of this system
may result in maladaptive behavior if a system designed for empathy, altruism,
and nurturance of family members and others in a closely related group becomes
directed to the world outside the family. The implication is that Western
societies are subject to invasion by non-Western cultures able to manipulate
Western tendencies toward reciprocity, egalitarianism, and close affectional
relationships in a manner that results in maladaptive behavior for the
European-derived peoples who remain at the core of all Western societies.
Because others' interests and perspectives are viewed as legitimate, Western
societies have uniquely developed a highly principled moral and religious
discourse, as in the arguments against slavery characteristic of the
nineteenth-century abolitionists and in the contemporary discourse on animal
rights. Such discourse is directed toward universal moral principles--that is,
principles that would be viewed as fair for any rational, disinterested
observer. Thus in his highly influential volume, Theory of Justice, John Rawls
(1971) argues that justice as objective morality can only occur behind a "veil
of ignorance" in which the ethnic status of the contending parties is
irrelevant to considerations of justice or morality. It is this intellectual
tradition that has been effectively manipulated by Jewish intellectual
activists, such as Israel Zangwill and Oscar Handlin, who have emphasized that
in developing immigration policy Western principles of morality and fair play
make it impossible to discriminate against any ethnic group or any individual.
Viewed from the perspective of, say, an African native of Kenya, any policy
that discriminates in favor of Northwestern Europe cannot withstand the
principle that the policy be acceptable to a rational, disinterested observer.
Because Zangwill and Handlin are not constrained by Western universalism in
their attitudes toward their own group, however, they are able to ignore the
implications of universalistic thinking for Zionism and other expressions of
Jewish particularism. Because of its official policy regarding the genetic and
cultural background of prospective immigrants, Israel would not be similarly
subject to invasion by a foreign group strategy. Indeed, one might note that
despite the fact that a prominent theme of anti-Semitism has been to stress
negative personality traits of Jews and their willingness to exploit gentiles
(SAID, Ch. 2), a consistent theme of Jewish intellectual activity since the
Enlightenment has been to cast Jewish ethnic interests and Judaism itself as
embodying a unique and irreplaceable moral vision (SAID, Chs. 6-8)--terms that
emphasize the unique appeal of the rhetoric of the morality of the
disinterested observer among Western audiences. The result is that whether
Western individualistic societies are able to defend the legitimate interests
of the European-derived peoples remains questionable. A prominent theme
appearing in several places in this volume and in PTSDA (Ch. 8) and SAID (Chs.
3--5) is that individualistic societies are uniquely vulnerable to invasion by
cohesive groups such as has been historically represented by Judaism.
Significantly, the problem of immigration of non-European peoples is not at
all confined to the United States but represents a severe and increasingly
contentious problem in the entire Western world and nowhere else: Only
European-derived peoples have opened their doors to the other peoples of the
world and now stand in danger of losing control of territory occupied for
hundreds of years. Western societies have traditions of individualistic
humanism, which make immigration restriction difficult. In the nineteenth
century, for example, the Supreme Court twice turned down Chinese exclusion
acts on the basis that they legislated against a group, not an individual
(Petersen 1955, 78). The effort to develop an intellectual basis for
immigration restriction was tortuous; by 1920 it was based on the legitimacy
of the ethnic interests of Northwestern Europeans and had undertones of
racialist thinking. Both these ideas were difficult to reconcile with the
stated political and humanitarian ideology of a republican and democratic
society in which, as Jewish pro-immigration activists such as Israel Zangwill
emphasized, racial or ethnic group membership had no official intellectual
sanction. The replacement of these assertions of ethnic self-interest with an
ideology of "assimilability" in the debate over the McCarran-Walter act was
perceived by its opponents as little more than a smokescreen for "racism." At
the end, this intellectual tradition collapsed largely as a result of the
onslaught of the intellectual movements reviewed in this volume, and so
collapsed a central pillar of the defense of the ethnic interests of
European-derived peoples. The present tendencies lead one to predict that
unless the ideology of individualism is abandoned not only by the
multicultural minorities (who have been encouraged to pursue their group
interests by a generation of American intellectuals) but also by the
European-derived peoples of Europe, North America, New Zealand, and Australia,
the end result will be a substantial diminution of the genetic, political, and
cultural influence of these peoples. It would be an unprecedented unilateral
abdication of such power and certainly an evolutionist would expect no such
abdication without at least a phase of resistance by a significant segment of
the population. As indicated above, European-derived peoples are expected to
ultimately exhibit some of the great flexibility that Jews have shown
throughout the ages in advocating particular political forms that best suit
their current interests. The prediction is that segments of the
European-derived peoples of the world will eventually realize that they have
been ill-served and are being ill-served both by the ideology of
multiculturalism and by the ideology of deethnicized individualism. If the
analysis of anti-Semitism presented in SAID is correct, the expected reaction
will emulate aspects of Judaism by adopting group-serving, collectivist
ideologies and social organizations. The theoretically underdetermined nature
of human group processes (PTSDA, Ch. 1; MacDonald 1995b) disallows detailed
prediction of whether the reactive strategy will be sufficient to stabilize or
reverse the present decline of European peoples in the New World and, indeed,
in their ancestral homelands; whether the process will degenerate into a
selfdestructive reactionary movement as occurred with the Spanish Inquisition;
or whether it will initiate a moderate and permanent turning away from radical
individualism toward a sustainable group strategy. What is certain is that the
ancient dialectic between Judaism and the West will continue into the
foreseeable future. It will be ironic that, whatever anti-Semitic rhetoric may
be adopted by the leaders of these defensive movements, they will be
constrained to emulate key elements of Judaism as a group evolutionary
strategy. Such strategic mimicry will, once again, lead to a "Judaization" of
Western societies not only in the sense that their social organization will
become more group-oriented but also in the sense that they will be more aware
of themselves as a positively evaluated ingroup and more aware of other human
groups as competing, negatively evaluated outgroups. In this sense, whether
the decline of the European peoples continues unabated or is arrested, it will
constitute a profound impact of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy on
the development of Western societies. This book is the final volume in the
series on Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. A future comparative book,
tentatively titled Diaspora Peoples, extends the focus to groups other than
Jews and European peoples--the Romany, Assyrians, overseas Chinese, Parsis,
and Sikhs, among others. It will test the extent to which the concepts and
analyses employed in this series expand our understanding of group
interaction, cooperation, and competition, and therefore human evolution in
general.